I think it's sort of a chicken and egg effect. Suffering causes a desire for things to be different than they are, and a desire for things to be different than they are causes suffering — Pfhorrest
Suffering would also be caused by a lack of desire. I am not hungry, I don't eat, I feel bad. I feel no desire to connect with other people. I do not try to get close to them. I live an empty, improverished existence. I feel no desire to create or make something. My life is less interesting and more boring. And so on. Now one can argue that I might not notice some of the things that are missing without desire, but there is an improvished life, and some degree of added suffering. I am a social mammal. Take away my desires and I am not really a social mammal anymore. There is something fundamentally anti-life in all this. We could all take pain killers and Valiums all the time and suffer less in a certain way, but the organism 1) is not longer as a live and 2) suffering things it may or may not notice.It states loosely that suffering is caused by desire. — Pinprick
It seems to me, then, one is trying to go back to an animal stage before the prefrontal cortex. How would one buy the particular paints one would need for a particular art project, without having a mental image of one's plan for the canvas or even wanting to trying painting. Or in social situations, I can spontaneously notice my appetite for someone who I can see, but I cause myself problems if I think of my friend Joe and go to the phone.Appetite is the physiological condition of hunger, typically triggered by an empty stomach.
Desire is psychological; a thought; an image of hot crumpets dripping with honey (from memory) - the image of myself eating them - imagined pleasure - identification with this image (projected into the future).
Surely, seeking pleasure is at the core of our nature and if we became that detached we might have become robots. — Jack Cummins
How would one buy the particular paints one would need for a particular art project, without having a mental image of one's plan for the canvas or even wanting to trying painting. — Coben
...identification with this image... — unenlightened
I have the suspicion that if I were to somehow be continuously pleased or fulfilled, or whatever term means the opposite of suffering, that I would have no need for desire. If correct, doesn’t this argument essentially refute Buddhism? — Pinprick
Obviously one needs to have an image of the colours in such a case. Likewise an architect imagines a building, and even a speaker foresees the end of his sentence. Buddhists are not idiots, and they do not seek to stop all thought or suppress all images. — unenlightened
This is the step that one does not need to make when buying paint. There is a whole process of knowledge from the past projected into the future that is the basis of science and much of what we do day to day. It is very effective as long as it is directed outwards to the world. It is when it is directed inwards that it becomes identification and gains the power to cause suffering. there, it extends the self in time.
So here's the Animal Farm slogan for you - Plan to do, good; plan to be, bad. — unenlightened
And this also feels no quite Buddhist to me. — Coben
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